[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#919619: Bug#919619: NM 1.24.0 now has basic support for hidden networks with iwd backend

[Andreas Henriksson]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 12:42:57AM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 04.07.20 um 00:16 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> > Then how about _not_ recommend iwd but just lower from depending on 
> > wpasupplicant to only recommending it.  Because that's what it is: 
> > Recommended for all except special situations.  For now...  Right?
> 
> Hm, no. That's exactly the situation I want to avoid. The user
> installing iwd, removing wpasupplicant in the process, network not
> working anymore. A Recommends makes that even worse. Either iwd works as
> a drop-in replacement (without requiring explicit configuration) or not.
> That's basically my question.
> If it does, I'm happy to add an alternative Depends assuming Andreas is
> fine with that.

I can confirm there's still no automatic fallback to use iwd. It has to
be manually configured to even be attempted to be used. This is
something I'd personally consider a blocker if I where NM Debian
maintainer. I quickly asked upstream a while ago if we couldn't atleast
automatically fall back on iwd if we detect that wpasupplicant isn't
even *installed*, but their responses where negative. They don't seem
to like or support iwd usage at all....

Additionally as previously mentioned the iwd backend in NM still needs
more work to be production quality. Current state is that it's fully
usable as far as I can tell, but you'll likely occationally need to
restart NetworkManager.service when NM and iwd gets state out of sync.
(I've experienced this alot, but have not debugged it in detail. There
are likely many small issues to be found and ironed out here.)

At this point I don't think it's safe to allow the general public of NM
users to be able to uninstall wpasupplicant and people who really want
to use iwd with NM and really want to uninstall wpasupplicant to use
an equivs. I however would suggest keeping wpasupplicant around still
in case of emergency, if you're not in a situtation that forces you to
not have wpasupplicant installed for whatever reason (which should be
rare enough that using equivs to solve it seems suitable).

This is the situation as I see it for now. I've also previously
mentioned that I don't see anyone putting work into the situation
improving so I guess it'll remain the same for a forseeable future.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson